The newest microaggression: Mispronouncing someone’s name

A reader sent me a link to reason.com, a right-wing libertarian website, describing the newest form of microaggression: mispronouncing someone’s name. (They, in turn, took most of their story from a CNS News report (also a conservative site) by Amy Furr. As you’ll see, the reader was dismayed to have to find this stuff on right-wing sites, but it’s simply not reported on Left-ish media sites, which ignore this kind of story for obvious reasons.

At any rate, Furr says this (my emphasis):

Hundreds of school districts across the country have taken a pledge to “pronounce student’s names correctly” to avoid the “microaggression” of mispronunciation.

“Mispronouncing a student’s name truly negates his or her identity, which, in turn, can hinder academic progress,” according to Yee Wan, SCCOE’s director of multilingual education services.

Rita Kohli, assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside, says it is a sign of “microagression” when a teacher mispronounces, disregards, or changes a child’s name, because “they are in a sense disregarding the family and culture of the student as well.”

The Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada is one of 528 school districts across the country that have recently implemented a campaign to “pronounce students’ names correctly” – including names teachers and administrators find difficult or unfamiliar – in order to be sensitive to the ancestral and historical significance of a child’s name.

Truly, a good teacher should make every effort to pronounce a student’s name properly, though it’s hard to do when you teach 100-200 students, as I often did in beginning evolution. There is simply no time to go around the class during the first session and have everyone say their name, so you have to learn names during either labs or office hours, and you can forget both names and pronounciations for a lot of students. But seriously, does it really “negate a student’s identity” to have their name pronounced incorrectly in a large class?

If that’s the case, then I was negated many, many times—and still am. My name is rarely pronounced correctly (like a “coin”), but more often as Cone-ee, Coin-ee, Cone, and all possible permutations. But of course I am a white male, and so there’s no chance of identity negation. (Nor did it ever both me, but of course I have Privilege: It’s okay to mispronounce my name.) The campaign is most likely aimed at minority students—not blacks, but perhaps Hispanics, Africans, or those from the Middle East, and, of course, Poland, where there are no vowels.

The effects can be long-lasting. In 2012, Kohli and Daniel Solorzano examined the issue in a study called “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classrooms.” They found that the failure to pronounce a name correctly impacts the world view and social emotional well-being of students, which, of course, is linked to learning.

Nevertheless, it’s a matter of simple civility to try to pronounce everybody’s name correctly, for it shows you are paying attention to them as a person, whether they be white, black, Asian, or Hispanic. Sometimes it’s harder to pronounce foreign names, so some slack should be allowed, and of course when I lived in France, working in academics, nobody pronounced my name properly.

But “microaggression”? No way—not unless you’re bigoted and boorish enough to call all Hispanic males “José”. To turn this into a political issue conflates incivility or difficulty with language with being a bigot or racist, inflating the ever-expanding sphere of the Offense Culture. As the reason.com piece, written by Lenore Skenazy, notes:

So far, 528 school districts have taken the pledge to try to get names right—which you’d think most teachers would do without a pledge.

But if they never quite get the accent right? Is that really a diss or simply the fact that with a melting pot like America, some names are going to be (am I microaggressing?) harder to pronounce? My family and I hosted an exchange student here for a year and I don’t think we ever pronounced “Giovanni” like an Italian. We said it with our American accents. This did not seem to stymie him in any way.

It’s interesting that the reader who sent me this link has a name I’d have trouble with, too, but it’s not a name associated with “oppressed people.” He also felt bad being allied with the Right on this issue:

Now, with my genetic and cultural heritage as a Scots-Irish-Anglo-German-Welsh-Cherokee-Jew and with my very Irish, very long last name, I have always had my name mispronounced, as has my son with his traditional, but quite common, Welsh-origin name that gets mispronounced and misspelled, I had no idea I was supposed to be offended and to have felt abused, but then I’m sure this counts for us; we’re not “ethnic” enough to count as aggressed against, I suppose.

I’m sure getting sick of this Looney-Left regressive stupidity. I’m also getting sick of finding myself siding with the Right.

I think that many of us, including me, don’t like agreeing with a fair amount of what we see on right-wing websites.

219 Comments

My middle name, Lynn, is one that was bigendered (like Jean) until roughly 50 to 75 years ago. I have once in my life been asked if I was bothered having a “girl’s name” as my middle name, and noted it was my mother’s maiden surname, the surname of my maternal grandparents.

(It’s now THE most common middle name among women and a popular suffix to women’s names like Jocelyn or Madelyn.
African football player Lynn Swann born 1952 is the most recent vintage notable American male named Lynn.)

About 10 years ago I was in the San Francisco Public Library and saw an elderly African custodian exit the elevator with a nametag that said “Lynn”. I pointed and said, “Lynn, that’s my middle name”.

He replied, “Yessir, we gotta show these ladies who that name really belongs to!”

Clearly, men named with formerly bigendered names that have been rendered female are an oppressed class. There needs to be some research into what the side-effects of assuming men named Lynn are female really cause!! Loss of testosterone, shrinkage, who really knows what the impact of this might be.

My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn’t leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don’t blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me “Sue.”

Well, he must o’ thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a’ lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I’d get red
And some guy’d laugh and I’d bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a boy named “Sue.”

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I’d roam from town to town to hide my shame.
But I made a vow to the moon and stars
That I’d search the honky-tonks and bars
And kill that man who gave me that awful name.

Well, it was Gatlinburg in mid-July
And I just hit town and my throat was dry,
I thought I’d stop and have myself a brew.
At an old saloon on a street of mud,
There at a table, dealing stud,
Sat the dirty, mangy dog that named me “Sue.”

Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad
From a worn-out picture that my mother’d had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye.
He was big and bent and gray and old,
And I looked at him and my blood ran cold
And I said: “My name is ‘Sue!’ How do you do!
Now your gonna die!!”

Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes
And he went down, but to my surprise,
He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.
But I busted a chair right across his teeth
And we crashed through the wall and into the street
Kicking and a’ gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

I tell ya, I’ve fought tougher men
But I really can’t remember when,
He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss,
He went for his gun and I pulled mine first,
He stood there lookin’ at me and I saw him smile.

And he said: “Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong.”

He said: “Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I’m the son-of-a-bitch that named you “Sue.'”

I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I came away with a different point of view.
And I think about him, now and then,
Every time I try and every time I win,
And if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him
Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!

In French they have a lot too, but generally the female version is spelled with an extra ‘e’.
Rene(e), Jose(e), Pascal(e), Dominic(que), etc.
In Xhosa too: Simpiwe, Xolisa, Aphiwe, Asanda, Lindani, Phumzile, Olwethu, and many more. Although I’m no expert, I guess that about half the Xhosa names can be used for both sexes.

My dad’s middle name is Meredith. It’s a Welsh boys name meaning ‘great lord’ (also sometimes given, supposed falsely, as ‘sea lord’). Names move across genders all the time. I still primarily see Meredith as a boy’s name.

As to the mispronunciation I’d love to see these idiots pronounce ‘llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch’

I take it from the context that you are male. The ‘Lynn’ gave me no trouble (I know a ‘Lynn’ who I had assumed was female until corrected, so now I know better) – but I had assumed the ‘Joni’ was female. As in Joni Mitchell.

My first name’s Chris, though I have been called ‘Cess’ (I assume the person misheard as ‘Cecil’ and shortened it, at least I hope that’s what he intended), and occasionally in print, ‘Christ’, which raises all sorts of issues.

Lest our friends at reason.com be micro-aggressed by being mislabeled as a “right wing” website, you might want to be (not overly) sensitive to their avowed libertarianism, which places them well left of center on social issues, even as their economic policy positions tend to be right of center. I don’t know many right-wingers who favor marijuana legalization, support gay marriage, and fight against the censorship of pornography on 1st Amendment grounds–all positions regularly taken by reason.com writers.

Jerry, if you think Reason is “right wing” would you please write a column explaining why? It strikes me you are Greenwalding one of the few media outlets that had the courage to publish the Danish cartoons.

My first name is Darrell, rhymes with “barrel” not “Ferrell.” The “e” is the initial of my last name. When I first created an on line identity years ago Darrelle was the first thing I came up with that wasn’t already taken, including my full name.

Merilee, merilee shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough…

Sorry… couldn’t resist…

‘Micro-aggressions’? Trying to pronounce people’s names right is a simple matter of courtesy. And of course choosing to mispronounce someone’s name is to be deliberately rude. But when you’ve lived in East Asia as long as I have and have had your regularly mispronounced by people, through no fault or ill intent of their own, it really ceases to seem very important.

When I was in law school in the 1970s,I was talking with a professor who was Jewish. I referred to another professor, whose name was Rosenbaum as Rosenblum. I meant no disrespect. I simply was not familiar with many Jewish surnames at that time in my life. The professor with whom I was talking kindly explained to me that many Jewish people consider such mistakes to be anti-semitic. I did not know this and was glad he told me. Since that time, I have been more careful to get such names correct.

As J.Baldwin notes, the writers and editors of reason.com aren’t readily pigeonholed as right-wing. It’s notable that the author of that blog post is also the author of a blog and book “Free-range kids”; she’s opposed to helicopter parenting. A careful reading of her post reveals that she is skeptical of the microaggression claims.

when I googled this yesterday, thinking(hoping) it was an Onion article, the very far right sites like Breitbart were covering it and came up first in the listings, Reason was the least ideologically frozen of the bunch, which was why it was chosen to represent the issue.

Like you, Jerry, my last name has been mispronounced the vast majority of the time. Any possible way to mangle it, they found it!

(It’s “Bligh- (as in Captain Bligh) -Lee”, or, if you are in Norway, where it comes from, “Blee-lee” (‘Murican phonetic))

Was it annoying? Sometimes. Invalidating (whatever the hell verb they use)? No way.

All that said, I go out of my way to pronounce people’s names correctly (and to call them by name when I greet them). I speak English, German, French, and a little Italian and Spanish, and I’ve traveled in Asia and Africa and all over Europe so I can often figure it out.

I work with people from all over the globe. (My Irish colleagues, and we have a huge number of them — multiple facilities in the Republic — often have the names that give me the most trouble! Many spell their names in traditional Irish spelling (not sure if that’s even the right phrase!) and that’s really hard for me to figure out, even after a lot of experience!)

I’m glad one of the commenters mentioned Wales: besides Poland another place that vowels go to die! 🙂

Heh. I got lucky. Nearly everyone mispronounces both my first and last name. It has never bothered me, though it has on occasion amused me.

No one but my immediate family says my 1st name correctly. It is the same issue that many people have with the name Barry. The “a” should be pronounced as the “a” in “barrel” rather than as the “e” in “berry.”
I’ve always found it a bit puzzling that most people have a hard time pronouncing it correctly even when you demonstrate for them.

This really pisses my sister off, but I’ve never been bothered by it. To this day if my sister is within hearing she will very often interrupt and correct the person. Listening to the person trying to imitate my sisters proper pronunciation is often amusing.

As for my last name, everyone wants to add an extra “e” in the middle of it. Both when pronouncing it and writing it. I think they just find it so unusual to have so many consonants together that they figure something must be wrong.

I’ve always thought it interesting that in both Spanish and German, both Indo-European but evolved to sound quite different from each other, Rs are often rolled, but quite differently! In Spanish rolled Rs sound musical, but German manages to make them sound harsh.

McLaughlin is commonly regarded as an Irish spelling. I recently met a man whose name is spelled exactly like mine, but he pronounces it Mac-lach-lan (“a” as in “hat”). A common mispronunciation (in my view) is Mag-loch-lan, but there is a TV reporter on BBC Scotland who appears to prefer it.

One of my wife’s colleagues recently required help from the principal of their school to call the police.

She was greeting a girl (2nd grade, 6 or 7 years old) by shaking her hand and saying, “good morning honey, welcome to school!”

And the mother’s reaction was, “Her name’s not honey! And don’t you ever touch my child again!” And it went downhill from there … To the point where the police had to be called to escort the screaming mother out of the building.

People have no idea the shit teachers have to deal with these days.

(Oh, and if a kid does poorly in school? Always the teacher’s or school’s fault. Always. Parents and students have no responsibility for performance. And with an attitude like that (passive observer) is there any surprise they aren’t doing well? Don’t get me started.)

I agree the mother overreacted, to say the least. However, I have an extreme dislike of having someone who doesn’t know me, calling me “honey”, or any other term of endearment. It happens all the time with retail workers and servers. I think it’s rude.

Here you would kind of endearingly be called ‘ouma’ (meaning ‘granny’, but it is not considered disrespectful or patronising -no microagression) or tannie/auntie. In Xhosa you would be ‘sissi’ or just ‘mama’, slightly familiar, but respectful.
Strangely the word ‘skattebol’ or deminutive ‘skattebolletjie’ (litt ‘treasureball’ or ‘treasurehead’) is used for female children and adults, but -that is the puzzling part- for males only for adults (by females). All this for people one does not know (or hardly), of course.

I agree. And I think Rita is missing the larger point about Jerry’s article, which is that we shouldn’t be taking offense at every little faux pas and accidental insult we get. If Rita thinks a teacher calling a 7-yr-old “honey” is overfamiliar or demeaning, I get it. I respect it, too. No problem; you say to the teacher “hi, I’d really appreciate it if you called my daughter by her name, [x], or “young miss” if you can’t remember that.” And then you move on with your life. The problem with the ‘microaggresion’ movement is that they don’t act this way; they appear to think faux pas should be treated like major incidents. Here, they claim it’s psychological damage.

The far left seems to demand tolerance of others but never shows tolerance. Part of tolerance is tolerating other people’s careless or just socially different conduct towards you. Letting things go. Lumping it. Having a thick skin. And they seemed to have missed that part.

NEA: Yee Wan … was faced with the overwhelming and unfair decision over whether she would keep her native name or change it to something more “Americanized.” Why? So that educators would not struggle over the pronunciation.

I worked with a bunch of Chinese people, and most of them came up with a “European” name for themselves before they came here, but then those “overwhelming and unfair” new names weren’t used much, if at all.

On the other hand, none of them could pronounce the boss’s name correctly.

This could be partly due to the fact that majority Indian names are derived from Sanskrit, which has a tradition of joining the words with a modifier to form a longer word. There are strict rules on which letter gets omitted or modified when joining these words. The modified letter normally becomes “half letter”.

Also, most Indian languages have a hard and soft T, D and Gs. In addition, the letters a”, “e”, “u” and “y” are pronounced differently in India. All of these adds to a hell of a confusion when an Indian arrives in North America. Indian names “Japan” and “Tushit” get a whole new meaning in North America

When I was in research, we were surrounded by faculty, students, and post-docs from all over the world. It turned out that the lab next door had two people named José, and as a joke someone suggested to call them Jose-A and Jose-B.
That was pretty funny then, and the low-brow humorist in me still thinks its funny.

Flippantly, I always thought that people had a right to be called what they like but if you spell something Smith and want it pronounced as Jones you are probably not onto a winner.

Less flippantly – and taking PCC(E)s example of French – how should one pronounce the name of the French capital? Does it depend on where one is, and does the Texas town of the same name get a different pronunciation?

The British and American pronunciations of Ian (example above) and Colin are completely different. Which is “right” or is it context dependent – I know at least one American Colin, born in Canada, who uses the British (perhaps also Canadian?) form. Colin Powell btw says that he grew up with the British pronunciation and it was switched for him, and without consultation, by America – can one microaggress someone in his position?

So, I do my best at a personal level, but call bs on the whole debate.

People can’t even spell my damned name (often when it is written down in front of them). There are at least three common substitutions used in various combinations. I normally spell it out and then folks transpose it wrong anyway (“….yes a,r,d; that’s why I spelled it out for you”…..”).

Interesting on the name Colin. I (as a USian) had never heard it pronounced in the manner of Colin Powell’s public pronunciation when I first heard his name. I’ve yet to meet or hear another one pronounced that way.

Based on how it’s pronounced in British movies, I’ve always heard it pronounced in the British way.

That’s interesting – it’s an unusual name here and he was the only USian I knew of with the name for a long time. I know his parents were from Jamaica, which has strong British ties.

OK – here is what that font of all knowledge wikipedia says:

Despite his parents’ pronunciation of his name as /ˈkɒlᵻn/, Powell has pronounced his name /ˈkoʊlᵻn/ since childhood, after the heroic World War II flyer Colin P. Kelly Jr..[14] Public officials and radio and television reporters have used Powell’s preferred pronunciation.

That’s a little different than the version I remember him telling during an interview, although the end product is the same – a change in pronunciation, although to his choice.

I had honestly never heard the non-British pronounciation of “Colin” until Colin Powell. I have no idea where it came from; I don’t think even in the U.S. that the long o in that name is typical. Even among USAians, I typically hear the short British o used in that name. More like fallin’ than trolling.

Speaking of that short o…when my family went to Australia, the Australians couldn’t understand why my parents would ever name my sister Barney. Her name is Bonnie, but my Pennsylvania dutch family pronounces the o as a longer “ah” rather than the very short Aussie/British o. Thus, they thought we were saying Barney. 🙂

“…Where are you from asked this nosey Pom
As I downed the amber fluid.
So I told him straight, Australia mate,
and I feel like getting plastered.
But the beer’s all crook and the Shiela’s look
Like you, you Pommy bastard.”

(This would be truer during the last generation or so in the U.S. navy. From my experience in the U.S. navy, a “shillelagh” is a length (approx. four ft.?) of fire hose with a duct-taped handle, used judiciously on the gluteals of “pollywogs” by “shellbacks” when crossing the Equator. One is a “golden shellback” if one crosses the Equator at the Prime Meridian or the International Dateline.)

I have a last name that pretty much cannot be pronounced correctly by an English speaker, since it contains sounds and sound combinations that don’t exist in English language.
Since I had no idea that mispronouncing (and I assume misspelling as well) my name is a microaggression against me, I used to collect letters with misspellings of my name just for fun.
But now that I’ve been woke, I may use my collection of microaggressions to file a lot of microlawsuits demanding some serious microrestitution and microdamages.

Truly, a good teacher should make every effort to pronounce a student’s name properly…But seriously, does it really “negate a student’s identity” to have their name pronounced incorrectly in a large class?

As some other commenter stated a few weeks back, if it’s a microagression then the person should only get microupset about it. To that I would add: we should also expect any negative to come out of it to have microimpact on someone’s identity. Unless they have a microidentity.

If that’s the case, then I was negated many, many times—and still am. My name is rarely pronounced correctly (like a “coin”), but more often as Cone-ee, Coin-ee, Cone, and all possible permutations.

My last name is a slight permutation on a ‘regular’ name, but its so odd that people regularly “correct” my spelling of my own name. This has even occurred on legal documents – my High School diploma, for instance. The school principal took extra care to get it right because he knew about the problem, but someone at the state administrative office decided I must’ve spelled my own name wrong and changed it. So technically I haven’t graduated from High School, even though I have a PhD. 🙂 Its gotten so bad that some of my relatives have legally changed their name to the regular spelling, just so they wouldn’t have to deal with it.

But, through it all, instead of getting microaggrieved I tend to get microamused. Its much healthier, IMO. Though maybe only microhealthier.

Being English with a Portuguese name means I must have suffered cumulative macro aggression. Almost nobody I ever met from my country of birth knew how to pronounce my name without me having to carefully school them. There isn’t even consensus in my extended family on the correct pronunciation.

Given that I did pretty well academically anyway, I can only presume that my name has robbed me of a Nobel prize.

My Dad pronounces it to rhyme with Madeira. I gather that in Portugal, that would be considered incorrect. In Britain, people always get confused over the erei part, usually coming out with pee-air-a or variation.

In a university or college context I completely agree that the failure to pronounce someone’s name correctly is of minor consequence. I’ve been to university, in classes ranging from several hundred to 30 students, and I don’t know if I was ever called on by name. It just doesn’t happen enough for lecturers to gain familiarity with pronunciation.

But the research cited above refers to a K-12 context, and in that case the repeated failure to correctly pronounce someone’s name is, I think, deliberate and inexcusable. Face it, if you have a class of 30 kids and can’t figure out how to pronounce everyone’s name over the course of a ten month school year then you are mispronouncing it on purpose.

First, some sounds are just difficult to make depending on which language you grew up speaking. Many US native English speakers have a hard time rolling their r’s. Native French speakers can’t say the English word “owl” correctly. And pretty much anyone not raised speaking a tonal language is probably not even going to hear some important tonal differences, let alone correctly pronounce them. These sorts of pronunciation problems are not a question of effort or memory or good intent, they’re ‘muscle memory’ type limitations that can be extremely hard to overcome, even for the most socially conscious and linguistically careful person.

Second, its worth remembering that “K-12 teacher” can run the gamut from a 21-year-old, barely-passed-community-college person who just likes summers off to 40-year-veteran-schoolteacher-with-PhD. When someone tells us that “teachers” are making pronunciation mistakes, its probably not the latter that are the guilty parties. I have no doubt some younger and less educated teachers just don’t necessarily know how to pronounce words right. If someone is misspelling words in their senior year college essays, that person is not going to undergo some magical transformation upon graduation that makes them better at the language come September when they start their full time job.

More likely an aural deficiency. My bf and my ex-husband are hopeless at recognizing the different sounds. Not a matter of IQ. I find foreign languages pretty effortless but don’t ask me to draw anything that looks like anything recognizable.

“I honestly think there are mental deficits in these areas for some people”

Thanks, jb, and you really ought to realise that statements like this are not taken well by those of us who do have hardware+software impediments to processing language.

In my case, I had frequent ear infection in childhood, causing enough hearing problems to be referred to audiologists. I believe I adapted to large mid-range frequency cutouts by simplifying my phoneme charts, and also by parallel processing uncertainties — what might have been said. [A great way for a kid to become a punster, many possible renderings of a partially heard phrase are obviously wrong, but very funny].

I’ve studied a number of European languages, and have always found it to build the new vocabulary and grammar needed for basic competency in reading. But I cannot understand speech in any of these languages — my phoneme mapping breaks down so badly that I usually hear noise [not even blah-blah!] I’ve never studied tonal languages, but the Chinese spoken in the university sauna may as well be music.

I might say I understand spoken Spanish a bit [at least the Univision dialect], as its phoneme map isn’t very difficult for English speakers. But even then I cannot replicate the sounds of that language. This may involve a motor problem, but for the most part I can’t droduce a sound I can’t define!

It’s interesting to compare my struggle with language with my wife’s abilities. She has much more difficulty than I with written language, but picks up new languages and dialects like a third-graders. Earlier this summer she crammed to learn Russian for a bicycle trip that went through back-roads, no English countryside. And had a ball. In the same situation, witht he same prior effortI would have been ahead in reading newspapers, but would simply be lost trying to converse, even from a phrase bood.

To return to the microaggression take on pronouncing names.. It is not fair to assume that poor pronunciation is a sign of laziness or cultural insensitivity. Humans are not universally capable of learning new accents even in early adulthood.

This is why I find a fundamental difference between my given name (the name you see attached to this post) and a friend from years ago whose family name was written “Hryckowian”. (Polish Romanization, without diacritics, of a Ukrainian name.)

He explained the first day we spoke in school how to pronounce it. All the sounds exist in English, so one can memorize how to say it, as I did. What appalled me is that the teachers generally never learned to say it in all the time we were there – and my friend was a good student and often receiving awards and things, so there was lots of opportunity.

Contrast that with my name, which I don’t expect native speakers of many languages, including French, to ever get, since the sound written “th” does not exist in many.

However, I don’t think “microaggression” is the right word for how my friend was treated.

I might add also I had one instructor in CEGEP who took attendance the first class and asked us to answer the question “what should I call you?” in response, in case it was different from one’s legal name, or pronunciation was hard, etc. I think this should be something like standard procedure …

I wanted to add that I was raised, when in doubt, to give people what people say the most charitable interpretation. Apparently the new default is to assume racism, sexism, homophobia, Xenophobia, or bigotry.

Well, empathy and consideration are hard work. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt requires you think through what that might be. You can’t expect a SJW to talk, maintain their ire, and show charity at the same time, its just too much!

Maybe it’s because everyone mispronounces my name the first few times that I just don’t care and that I realize it’s not a micro aggression. People make mistakes. Nine times out of ten they figure it out quickly because it’s often embarrassing to them.

The people who continually mispronounce it or make a big deal about the spelling… well, that’s just jerks being jerks. Some people don’t grow past the age of 13.

Mine changed last week when I was in Taiwan. Not entirely sure why, using the same e-mail address – it enters automatically so not my fingers – but I ended up being impounded for posting approval and got a new icon. Switched back when I returned.

Most people I meet mispronounce my name. I’ve been called everything from “Larry” to “Ouch” and it hasn’t bothered me one bit. This is such bullshit. It is obviously the outgrowth of self-righteous extreme PC folks running out of things to get upset about but still feeling a pressing need to be upset about something, anything. Too bad their ultra-PC religion doesn’t allow them to get upset about things that actually matter, like the spread of conservative Islam and terrorist violence around the world.

When I was in high school, circa 2002 or 2003, I had a math teacher who couldn’t pronounce an Asian student’s name. He instead said, “I’ll call you Ching, how’s that?” I never saw him do anything else racist or inappropriate towards the student, but that has always stuck with me as being wildly inappropriate and hurtful. For the record, he always mispronounced my name as well, referring to me as “Darien,” though that seemed unintentional.

We must hope that Professor Kohli never visits the cities of Leicester [1] or Bicester [2] here in England, otherwise she runs the risk of micro-aggressing the entire population by mis-pronouncing the names of their home towns. And she should never even think of visiting the Vale of Belvoir [3].

Don’t even start on the Scottish. Some of the place names have been simplified (Druimuachdar is often rendered as Drumochter) but most of the mountains haven’t. Sgurr Dearg, Aonach Eagach, Buachaille Etive Mor – I can spell them but I can’t even begin to guess how to pronounce them.

Gareth is apparently not a common name in America and since I moved here I have frequently had it mispronounced and mispelt. When I spell it out in a coffeeshop, the cup invariably come back with “Garth” on it; last week it came back with “Galph”

When I say “My name is Gareth – G A R E T H” it really shouldn’t be difficult to get that down correctly. I don’t consider it a microaggression or dimishining me as a person but it does annoy me, although I can’t quite say why.

I actually looked up whether it should be “misspelt” or “misspelled” and, according to the first and only site I checked, either is OK. I then managed to leave out an “s” ! I guess there is a double irony to it.

Well it made me look it up, which is good – it’s one of those words that always feels wrong, no matter which way I write it. A cost of moving to a country with a similar language to the one we grew up with, perhaps.

There was this comment on the little pedant’s rules and anathemas for ‘good usage’ that Ant links to:

‘Amongst, whilst, and amidst are proper, British English. I grew up overseas and learned British English but now live in the us and still use them regularly. I’m the least pretentious person out there. Yes there are obnoxious people like madonna out there but sometimes people on this continent need more tolerance for other dialects of English too.’

I grew up in Britain and warmly agree: those usages are perfectly good British English, and people move quite naturally between, say”among’ and ‘amongst’.

I spent my teens living in the Netherlands, and have recently moved back here.
Between their ‘g’ being considerably different, and not really getting the whole ‘th’ thing, my name was pretty much a non-starter.
I came to hate introducing myself for a while (I don’t have much self-confidence), but got over it eventually.
If I knew I wouldn’t see that person again, I just introduced myself as Geert, closest Dutch sounding name.

And if that wasn’t enough, I was educated in international schools, most nationalities get it wrong first time, and some never get there.
Heard it all Gaah-rat, Gou-wuf, Ga-ret-he, and then some.

Nowadays, thanks to a certain football player, its less of an issue.

That said I’ve taken to using the Japanese transliteration of Garesu online, as it seems to encourage people to shorten it to Gar or Garo, which is what my Welsh relatives call me.
Much better than Garth or Geert.
Extra bonus is that its never already taken, though now that I’ve told you, I think that game is up.

I’m also hearing impaired, so I have an official excuse to bollocks up other people’s names :p

I would guess maybe one in ten get my last name right. It is just expected to come out wrong. A much more important factor that irritates is growing up in a small town where everyone knows you. I did not know how bad that was until I went away to the big cities and actually got to live unknown. What an improvement that is.

In high school, we had an exchange student from India, or maybe it was Pakistan? Gosh, I forgot. In typical lackadaisical teenage fashion, several of my classmates decided it was best not to put forth any effort in pronouncing his name correctly. We called him Donut. I will never remember his real name, because we never called him anything but Donut. He seemed amused by it and happy to be accepted. Hopefully he’s doing well these days.

I have had people ARGUE with me that my first name is pronounced “Jeannie”. No it is no. And my last name? I have been called everything from “Aloha” to “Oahu”. I always say my last name is pronounced A law ya. As in, “If you are a New York attorney, you are “A Law-ya”.

My antisemitic 5th grade teacher mispronounced my name, when I was a new student at the school, and then turned a blind eye when the other kids not only threw the disgusting version in my face, day after day, but started ganging up and cornering me with threats of “The Jews killed Jesus”, as though they were going to attack me for it. A couple years later, I was attacked, twice, in two different classes.

That was the start. The bullying continued for five full years, until I entered high school. Luckily, the high school combined kids from enough junior high schools to dilute my attackers, and the new (to me) boys found me attractive enough that the bullies kept their distance.

Those five years were hell, and that hell was deliberate. Not one other teacher stepped in to help, over all those years.

Teachers should get their students’ names right. It’s not like they’re strangers. There are only so many Spanish surnames and the rules for pronouncing Spanish are relatively simple. Mispronouncing it after being corrected once or twice would certainly seem deliberately insulting.

If a Spanish speaker pronounced ‘Jerry’ as ‘Hairy’ day after day that would certainly be cause for concern.

“I think that many of us, including me, don’t like agreeing with a fair amount of what we see on right-wing websites.”

So what if you agree with the “right”?

The left-wing has been peddling a bunch of nonsense and dangerous ideas for some years now.

Take a look a the left’s love for identity politics which is partly responsible for the rise of the alt-right/white nationalism movement and is dividing people in a way that in a very similar way to the racism of old.

Take a look at the rise of comrade Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-semitic populist from the UK.

Take a look at Justin “i’m a feminist” Trudeau promoting a gender segregated mosque.

And what moral high ground have, say, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump & David Duke? I, too, dislike the ‘regressive left’, along with the Trotskyist nit-pickers and other fanatical dogmatists I came across in my youth, but I nevertheless wonder why, when all across Europe and elsewhere, including the USA,chauvinism is growing stronger and chauvinists are coming closer and closer to power, people such as yourself seem to be exercised only by what, in a undiscriminating manner, you term ‘the left’ and seem to remain oblivious to the threat posed by the extreme right.

I might add that, with the historian Tony Judt, who was, by shallow standards, a man of the ‘left’, I have time for such writers and men of the ‘right’ as Ernst Junger or the English poet Charles Sisson or an unclassifiable philosopher like Leszek Kolakowski,who wrote the greatest critique of Marxism ever written, just as I have time for such writers of the ‘left’ as Edward Bond & Harold Pinter, Orwell or Bertrsnd Russell. One may learn to see reality from many sources, and I find this division of humanity into ‘left’ and ‘right’ simply infantile.

My point is, if you find moderates on the right that you happen to agree with, there’s no shame in that. In this day and age there’s plenty of lunatics on either side of the spectrum, and thinking that agreeing with a right winger on issues, is some kind of moral failure is hilariously out of touch.

As for your rise of the extreme right comment, i’m afraid this is another failure of the left to address people’s concerns.

The left’s failure to address the threat that islam/islamism/whatever poses and it’s labeling of critics as racists is just one of many examples as to why people are voting for the extreme right.

Now you can chalk this up to the regressive left wing of the “Left”, but to the common citizen it makes no difference (is there such a thing as a non-regressive left wing party out there?). Only the extreme right parties are listening, so if you are truly scared of them, spare me your self righteousness and butthurt, and go tell your fellow leftists to wake the fuck up (or better yet, create a non-regressive political party).

I find very odd the insistence of some on this website that Muslims should be held accountable for their beliefs, whereas when it comes to the beliefs or prejudices held by the extreme right, the right is not accountable and people cannot be held accountable for voting for them: it’s all the fault of what you, an American, call the ‘left’ (I say this, because Americans often seem to have very odd ideas about they suppose the ‘left’ is). But, consider: perhaps those terrible ideas on the left which you so much despise are the consequence of the behaviour of the right – the Farages, the various chauvinists who have taken power (Poland, Hungary) or are closer to taking power in Europe, the Drumpfs, the David Dukes, the George Zimmermans… You are adopting a double standard, wallowing in inconsistencies. As for the question about ‘non-regressive left-wing parties’, I suggest that you do a little research and learn a little about history, especially outside the USA. I was not, I’m afraid, much moved by your show of temper at the end, complete with the cliche ‘butthurt’.

Thank you for your spleen. If you seriously believe that ‘leftists’ are all splendidly in favour of HC, or that the Democratic Party is, or has been for a number of years now, anywhere near being a ‘leftist’ party… well, I shall say no more.

The political mess we are finding ourselves in derives not so much from the faults of leftists or rightists, but from the near-dogmatic belief in the ‘market’ (it is this belief that has encouraged massive immigration, not welcoming lefties), and from the assumption that politics is a mere epi-phenomenon of economic forces and that if you take care of the pennies, as it were, the politics will take care of itself.

I am very glad that a moderate Muslim is now mayor of London, and that the racist campaign mounted by his adversary was unsuccessful.

I might add that I hold no brief for HC, and certainly not for what has hitherto seemed to be her assumption, where foreign policy is concerned, that if you bomb some country you dislike, it will miraculously turn into a splendid democracy overnight – an assumption shared, of course, by David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair & the great Dubbya (I shan’t mention Henry Kissinger & Richard Nixon). And then when refugees start pouring out of the shattered, war-torn area, you raise your draw-bridges and vote for Brexit & Drumpf (that sounds like the name of a particularly foul delicatessen). As a matter of fact, I largely agree with, for example, the excoriation of PuffHo and the stupidities of the ‘regressive left’, but only wish that people might be equally exercised by, oh, let us say Fox News or the Daily Mail and the power and influence they have had and still possess and the lies they trade in; but, no, it is some entity called the ‘left’ they seem to be single-mindedly concerned with, to the point where they seem to be less interested in looking at political realities dispassionately and in trying to come up with some answers to problems than in banging away on the same limited part of the keyboard all the time.

People almost always get my surname slightly wrong. I’m used to it. I only bother to correct them if it’s for some official record.

Me too.

With personal names as with place names, I’ve always taken correct pronunciation to be like scoring a minor point in the general knowledge quiz that is conversation.

I recently met a man with exactly the same surname as me, but with a different pronunciation. As it’s his name, I now make the effort (and it’s very hard) to pronounce it his way when addressing him. Fortunately we all go by first names these days, but I have to be very careful when introducing him.

Same comment for your real surname. None of the few Wp pages for people with that surname that I sampled had any pronunciation guide, which suggests that most people think that there’s one, obvious pronunciation.

Mine’s been misheard (and thus written down) by people from Sheffield as “Hallam”, the name for the local area.

Your article made reference to an Italian name pronounced in an American accent. Now if I were to try to imitate an Italian accent to get the pronunciation right, I can be accused of cultural misappropriation. So damned if I do and damned if I dont.

In my K-12 substitute teaching travels, generally going to a different school at least 75% of my gigs, I have no opportunity to previously confirm the correct pronunciation of names, though I have a pretty good track record of pronouncing them correctly.

I preface each roll-taking with the statement: “I apologize in advance if I pronounce your name incorrectly. Please say ‘here’ and NICELY tell me how to correctly pronounce your name. (There are of course seating charts but that doesn’t help with pronunciation.)

The occasional student does take umbrage at being called “Miss” or “Sir” (since I can’t possibly remember names during that no more than a day-long encounter), insisting that I call them by their names, or by a nickname which is not on the roll. (One young lady responded, “Little Miss has a name!” Another young male primate complained to another teacher about my addressing him as “Sir,” and she proceeded to set him straight on the matter.) Blame it on their youth, I suppose, but from whom do they learn this breath-taking sense of entitlement and “specialness”?

(When I introduce myself, I do so in a fun way as an ice-breaker, purposefully mispronouncing my own name in several different ways, which they find quite funny. I guess I’m allowed to make fun of my own name and, anyway, I’m a white male, eh? I end up telling them that all they have to remember Is Mr. first letter of last name. I occasionally say (usually on the heels of a student taking umbrage at my mispronunciation – despite my pre-emptory apology – that I myself don’t REQUIRE them to remember my name, which is of course plainly writ large on the board).

I guess I went off the deep end in that I, a Scots-English hillbilly born in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, played the guitar and sang “Cielito Lindo” while they played percussions instruments and danced.

Once I was asked by children of new friends of mine, “Why do you have a horse’s name?”

Turns out, they had known a horse named Marilee (but I don’t know how the horse spelled it). I rather liked sharing this horse’s name especially when they told me that Marilee sometimes jumped over her fence and ran away.

Wow. I had no idea I’d been microaggressed continuously for as long as I can remember. I am also quite certain I will continue to be microaggressed for the indefinite future. Unless I move to Finland. But then, again, maybe that’s not a group that can be microaggressed against. This is all getting way too confusing.

This is crazy. I can see it could be a problem when some pompous jerk mispronounces a name on purpose (which I have actually seen done), but it negates their identity? I’m sorry, some people give their kids names that are just very difficult to pronounce, or even spell them in a way that their preferred pronunciation does not allow for (and I am not necessarily talking about foreign-born kids). I once encountered a parent that had a child named “Mercedes”, except that they spelled it “Merdedes”, and the parent became very upset when asked if that was the correct spelling.
I had a student from Africa in a class this year, and I tried my best to pronounce the name according to the letters used to spell it, and was told “Not even close” by the student. he did not, however, bother to tell me how to actually pronounce it… So, now I just call him by his last name.